Governor Andrew Cuomo says time runs out for new big bills

Albany veterans question no new talks given history of last-minute approval of major bills

With just 10 session days left before state lawmakers are scheduled to vacate Albany — possibly for the rest of the year — Gov. Andrew Cuomo believes it's too late to introduce major legislative initiatives.

"Let me make this as a blanket statement: It is late in the day for anything," Cuomo said Friday in Manhattan.

He was responding to questions about two big and controversial ideas: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's three-week-old proposal to amend the 421-a tax abatement program for real estate developers, and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's introduction this week of a program bill containing sweeping ethics reforms.

The final scheduled session day is June 17.

"Anyone who's watched Albany with one eye for a short period of time (knows) you can't get, realistically, a complicated issue done with this Senate and this Assembly in the midst of everything that's going on in a matter of days," Cuomo said. "It's not how it works."

But the timetable of what works at the Capitol is often a question of political will — and few wills are more formidable than the governor's.

One only needs to look back two years for an example of how swiftly an ambitious idea can move from unveiling to passage: On May 22, 2013, Cuomo rolled out what was then known as "Tax-Free NY," a plan to create a network of zones around public higher-education centers to attract businesses with the promise of a decade-long suspension of taxes. At the time it was unveiled, there were only 14 session days left. Rebranded as "Start-Up NY," it was approved in the final rush of business less than month later.

That venture, however, was a veritable early bird compared to an even more sweeping 2013 legislative proposal that Cuomo introduced on June 11, when just six session days remained: the Public Trust Act, a massive ethics overhaul covering everything from new prosecutorial tools and the creation of a public financing system for campaigns to closure of the so-called "LLC loophole" that allows deep-pocketed political donors to multiply the force of their giving.

At a news conference detailing that package, Cuomo was asked whether he expected the Legislature to take it up. "Hope springs eternal (but) ... I wouldn't say I see an especially easy glide path to passage for this bill," he said.

Indeed, lawmakers reacted to the Public Trust Act with deafening silence, prompting Cuomo less than a month later to convene a Moreland Commission panel to examine public corruption. The following March, Cuomo scuttled that body midway through its planned 18-month lifespan after negotiating a far more modest set of ethics reforms. That early demise, and reports that Cuomo's administration meddled in the panel's investigations, have dogged the governor ever since, and are reportedly among the matters currently being examined by the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara.

Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi noted that Cuomo had been discussing the outlines of the Public Trust Act for the previous two months in reaction to the arrests of a string of lawmakers to face federal corruption charges. He also noted that the Start-Up initiative was embraced — with a few tweaks — by legislative leaders and passed by wide margins in both houses.

The scandals revealed in the 2013 session, however, pale in comparison to those of the past five months, which have seen the arrests of both legislative majority leaders. Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Republican Senate Leader Dean Skelos were forced from power but remain as rank-and-file lawmakers as they fight federal charges — indictments secured by Bharara's office.

Schneiderman's ethics proposal contains pieces of Cuomo's 2013 Public Trust Act, plus knottier concepts including a ban on all outside income for lawmakers and a commensurate boost in their pay.

Appearing Friday in Nassau County — Skelos' home turf — the attorney general addressed the issue of the fast-approaching end of the session.

"Some people have said there's not time enough to act," said Schneiderman, a former Democratic state legislator. "Those of us who have been through an end of session in Albany know that three weeks is a lifetime. Bills have not yet been written that will come to life, die, come back, die again and come back again.

"There is plenty of time to do this," he said.

Cuomo has been critical of de Blasio, a fellow Democrat with whom he has a fractious friendship, in the wake of the mayor's visit to Albany on Wednesday to stump for his proposal to reform 421-a. Like rent regulations in New York City, the program is scheduled to expire next month.

Three weeks ago, De Blasio and the Real Estate Board of New York agreed on a proposal that would extend the program while demanding that developers set aside a percentage of affordable units in buildings that receive the benefit. De Blasio's plan, however, does not require the payment of what is known as "prevailing wages" to construction workers on such projects, which has led the AFL-CIO to call the plan "disappointing."

"For an issue this complex and this controversial, I don't think it's realistic to think that you can broach this issue this late in the legislative session and have a fulsome debate," Cuomo said Friday.

"You know, the legislative session starts in January," the governor said. " ... So this is a conversation, frankly, that should have started much earlier if we were going to have a fair resolution by the end of the session."

The governor has not yet offered any concrete details on the changes he would like to make to 421-a.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union's editor. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now."

Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky. He lives in Albany's lovely Pine Hills.